Children with poor working memory: Cognitive and behavioural profiles, and classroom support

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Children with poor working memoryCognitive and
behavioural profiles, and classroom support

• Susan Gathercole
• University of York

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Key features of working memory

• Mental workspace
• Capacity limitation that varies between
  individuals
• Catastrophic loss

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Characteristics of children with poor working
memory

• Poor academic progress
• Of 120 children with poor working memory aged
  either 5/6 or 9/10 years (Gathercole Alloway,
  2008)
• 83 scored poorly on either reading or maths
  tests
• the great majority of these scored poorly in both
  areas

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Characteristics of children with poor working
memory

• Poor academic progress
• Normal social relationships

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Characteristics of children with poor working
memory

• Poor academic progress
• Normal social integration
• Reserved in large groups in classroom

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Observations

• Luke (aged 9) is extremely reserved in both
  whole-class and group activities. He reluctantly
  answers direct questions, tending to use gestures
  such as shrugging his shoulders or nodding his
  head to denote a response. When Luke does respond
  verbally, it is usually in response to fairly
  simple tasks. Likewise, he rarely volunteers
  information or answers. On occasions when he does
  raise his hand to make a response, he often
  doesnt know what to say. For instance, Luke
  volunteered to explain how to recognise odd
  numbers in a numeracy lesson but was unable to do
  so when finally asked.
• Ross (6 years) is a reserved and quiet child who
  tends not to volunteer responses and rarely
  answers direct questions, particularly in the
  whole-class situation. He is sometimes becomes
  more vocal when working in small groups although
  he isnt necessarily discussing the task in hand.
  

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Characteristics of children with poor working
memory

• Poor academic progress
• Normal social integration
• Reserved in large groups in classroom
• Difficulties in following instructions
• The teacher asked the class to Put your sheets on
  the green table, arrow cards in the packet, put
  your pencil away and come and sit on the carpet.
  John (6 years) moved his sheets as requested, but
  failed to do anything else. When he realized that
  the rest of the class was seated on the carpet,
  he went and joined them, leaving his arrow cards
  and pencil on the table.

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Characteristics of children with poor working
memory

• Poor academic progress
• Normal social integration
• Reserved in group situations in classroom
• Difficulties in following instructions
• Problems with activities that combine processing
  and storage, e.g.,
• identifying the rhyming words in a 4-line poem
• Identifying the missing numbers in a sequence

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Characteristics of children with poor working
memory

• Poor academic progress
• Normal social integration
• Reserved in large groups in classroom
• Difficulties in following instructions
• Problems with activities that combine processing
  and storage
• Place-keeping difficulties in complex tasks

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Place-keeping difficulties

• In class, Nathan struggles with keep up with many
  classroom activities. For example, when the
  teacher wrote on the board Monday 11th November
  and, underneath, The Market, which was the title
  of the piece of work, he lost his place in the
  laborious attempt to copy the words down letter
  by letter, writing moNemarket.
• Skipping and repetition errors are frequent

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Characteristics of children with poor working
memory

• Poor academic progress
• Normal social integration
• Reserved in group situations in classroom
• Difficulties in following instructions
• Problems with activities that combine processing
  and storage
• Place-keeping difficulties in complex tasks
• Judged by teachers to have short attention span
  and high distractibility

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Observations

• As the main part of the lesson developed, Ellen
  (10 years) became increasingly more distracted
  and appeared to lose total concentration. She
  began to swing on her chair, talk to her
  neighbour and shout out unrelated comments.
• Adam (5 years) struggles to maintain attention,
  particularly during whole-class teaching when the
  pupils join together on the carpet. Hence, he
  sits directly in front of the teacher and is
  frequently prompted to sit correctly and to pay
  attention as he regularly fidgets, looks around
  the classroom and distracts other children near
  him.

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Cognitive and behavioural profiles

• Low WM 50 children with low (lt86) scores on 2
  tests of verbal WM (listening recall and counting
  recall)
• ADHD 83 children with clinical diagnosis of
  combined sub-type of ADHD
• Average WM 50 children with scores gt90 of 2
  tests of verbal WM
• All children aged between 8 and 11 years

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Teacher Rating Scale T-scores
Holmes, Alloway, Gathercole et al. (in prep)
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Automated Working Memory Assessment Standard
scores
Holmes, Alloway, Gathercole et al. (in prep)
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Academic attainment and IQ Standard scores
Holmes, Alloway, Gathercole et al. (in prep)
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Three interventions ..

• Classroom support
• Working memory training
• Pharmacological treatment

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1 Classroom support

• Maybe the slow and errorful learning of this
  children is a result of the working memory loads
  of learning activities are too high, leading to
  frequent task failures.
• Aim of the intervention is to minimise learning
  difficulties by preventing working memory
  overload.
• Provide support and guidance for teachers with
  pupils identified as having poor working memory.

With Joe Elliott and Tracy Alloway
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The principles of the intervention

• Be aware of the warning signs of working memory
  failure
• Monitor the child
• Reduce amount of information to be stored
• Reduce difficulty of processing
• Be prepared to re-present important information
• Encourage the use of memory aids
• Help the child to use strategies

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Evaluation

• The teachers say
• it is relatively easy to implement as they can
  work with existing curriculum activities
• it has enabled them to understand that many task
  failures are due to forgetting
• the child benefits from working within own
  capacity, with greater rates of task success

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2 Working memory training with Robomemo

• Commercial product designed to train working
  memory using high-quality graphics game-style
  environment
• Child trains on 8 working memory tasks involving
  verbal or visuo-spatial information (storage/
  storageprocessing), or both, for 20-25 days over
  a 6-week period
• Child works continuously at span level
• Motivational features
• Our study
• 25 children with ADHD trained, all receiving
  fast-release psychostimulant medication
• Tested on Automated Working Memory Assessment
  pre- and post-training

Holmes, Gathercole, Place, Klingberg, Dunning
(submitted)
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ADHD group before and after training




No effect on either verbal or performance IQ
Holmes, Gathercole, Place, Klingberg, Dunning
(submitted)
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Low working memory group before and after training




No effect on either performance or verbal IQ
significant gains in instruction span
Holmes, Gathercole, Place, Klingberg, Dunning
(in prep.)
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3 Pharmacological treatment

• Psychostimulant medicant reduces the behavioural
  symptoms of ADHD .
• does it also enhance working memory?

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ADHD group working memory scores with and without
medication

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Overview

• Poor domain-general working memory is associated
  with learning difficulties in reading and maths.
• Children with poor working memory have distinct
  cognitive and behavioural profiles that have
  substantial overlap with ADHD.
• There are a range of support options
  classroom-based, direct training and,
  potentially, drug treatments ..

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Additional information

• Gathercole SE Alloway TP (Jan 2008). Working
  memory and learning A guide for teachers. Sage
  Publishing.
• www.york.ac.uk/res/wml
• s.gathercole_at_ psychology.york.ac.uk

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Verbal storage Digit recall
839251
839251
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Verbal complex memory Listening recall
bananas have teeth
false
chairs lay eggs
false
eggs, teeth
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Visuo-spatial storage Mazes memory
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Visuo-spatial complex memory Spatial span
Same/ different
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Alloway, Gathercole Pickering
(2006)Best-fitting measurement model from AWMA
5 - 15 years
Visuo-spatial tasks
Verbal tasks
Listen. recall
Mr X
F1
Back. dig. recall
Odd-one-out
.80
.50
Count. recall
Spatial span
.58
F2
F3
Dot matrix
Word recall
Mazes
Nonword recall
Digit recall
Block recall
Automated Working Memory Assessment